I still love summer and am a very official Motorist.

I certainly hope absence makes the heart grow fonder because I have been plain absent around these parts, haven't I? Chalk it up to summer travels, minor states of emergencies, and a general feeling of my life being on fast forward. Oh, and school is starting and I possibly went a bit mad and joined the PTA board of Cleo's school! Hello, time commitment!

I'm sad for summer to be coming to a close-there will never be enough days at the pool or bbq'd chicken in my book- but I am feeling ready to usher back some structure in my household. I've been sadly delinquent in crafting and reading and cooking anything that requires time in the oven. My heel callouses are out of hand and it is probably time to put on a pair of socks again. But man, it has been a fun summer. Swimming and tubing on rivers, learning to fly fish, hiking and smelling like campfire, sticky sheets and fans in the window; gin and tonics and fun bbqs and new groovy vintage patio set out on our deck; dirt under my nails and hummingbirds zooming overhead; clouds of white roses and cascades of blue morning glories; training chickens to jump; watching Flynn learn to ride a scooter; sandbox digging, Cleo's fairy house making; road trips and camping plans and happy babies being born and made. Life fairly overflows during summer doesn't it? And summer, I'm still not done with you yet!

We just returned from our annual summer road trip. For the last three years we've made a plan with one of my best friends from college to meet up and camp or spend a few days in a cabin somewhere we want to explore. It has become a great tradition, one made even sweeter by the fact that our daughters are only 3 months apart and fast friends. (We are pretty sure they think they are some kind of relation-some hybrid form between cousins and sisters.) I've gone off about my love of the road trip before, and I can't help but do it again. It is truly the best way to travel if you like landscape and regionalism and believe in the luxury of time. That is probably the single most ironic thing about road trips-the method of transport may not be luxurious and its definitely not convenient- but the act of meandering state to state without regard to time truly is. As a culture, we pride ourselves on quick flights to Vegas and convenient non- stops direct to Paris from Salt Lake, and yet there is nothing in those kind of journeys that makes me feel relaxed, and even less that engages me or piques my interest about where it is I'm traveling to. LIfe looks lifeless when seen from 30,000 feet.

When I lived in New York and rode the subway everywhere, the whole city felt to me like a disorienting mish-mash of disparate locations; walk up a set of stairs at 59th Street stop and you get Bloomingdales, walk up another set at the Bowery and you get restaurant store supply shops and cheap booze. It always felt like a puzzle (or teleporting) and it wasn't until we bought a car and drove the city more that I started to notice the subtle ways the pieces and neighborhoods fit and flowed from one to the next. The same thing happens for me on road trips. I love to watch the land flatten out into grassy plains and deep gorges and then rise up again into voluptuous mountains. You can literally see the tectonics and erosion at play. I like to watch the idiosyncrasies of local places-how some farmers in an area are suddenly partial to circular hay bales and others stick with the tried and true rectangles. Or the way that American cars take over the road as soon as you leave any sizable city. I like that I know that pretty much every small town in America has something called the Knotty Pine. And I love that road signs on forgotten highways often refer to drivers as "motorists" in the very 1950s technical way that we still call our summer cooling devices "air conditioners".

It's really satisfying to me to be thorough, I guess. And road trips are nothing but thorough. There is no way around the hundreds of miles of sagebrush plains that is so much of the West. But instead of noticing the expanse of more of the same, I try and relish it, waiting in suspense for the land to shift and the next town to come into view. It's really great work if you can get it, but believe me, you can get it if you try.

(All photos above are from the recent trip and courtesy of the awesome Hipstamatic app and Shake it app for the iphone. Everything looks better all old-timey doesn't it?)